Viva damão!

Living The WriTer’s life in daman

I’d been happily married to HR for 30 years. 

But by our silver anniversary, I’d started flirting with the Internet, 🛜 spending afternoons on the Information Highway. 🛣️ 

It was on one of those clandestine trips that I stumbled upon AWAI’s online plethora of copywriting courses. By the time I was halfway through their sales copy, I was so fascinated with copywriting that I purchased their Accelerated Copywriting course right away and started applying the concepts and techniques in making HR-writing engaging, and HR policies and initiatives effective.

Until then, for me, HR had been all about optimizing efficiency: building systems and processes. 

And here’s where conventional HR writing fails…

Conventional HR writing is understandably tagged, ‘technical writing,’ perhaps for being so ‘un’-understandable! Mostly instructional (‘efficiency’ at work), and at best, informational, conventional HR writing is no more effective in the 21st Century.

We don’t use typewriters anymore… we use computers (‘efficiency’ at work)

We don’t use manual systems anymore… We have state-of-the-art software (‘efficiency’ at work)

And the list goes on… emails, smart phones, webcams, teleconferences, teleseminars, webinars, etc., (more ‘efficiency’)

But what about ‘effectiveness?’

Just as advanced shipbuilding technology coupled with lagging metallurgy doomed the Titanic, so too, efficiency-focused, state-of-the-art HR processes have been making great advances while conventional HR writing remains entrenched in the 20th century, rendering it ineffective.

For Human Resources writing to be effective, the copy’s got to be written from the recipient’s perspective:

• Like moving from conventional to conversational
• From being merely instructional to informational
• It must be persuasive … like when introducing a new policy
• And even promotional… like when launching a new scheme

As the interface between a business (Big B) and its employees (Small e’s), HR is, by default, in a great position to build trust in employees and to influence employers—with the power of words.

In my experience, the best tools (they’re free) are the ones I borrowed from marketing—copywriting techniques—for ‘selling’ HR concepts, services, training programs, schemes, vacant positions, proposals, etc. to the company’s most discerning customer: its employees.

It makes sense—there’s a lot of Marketing (persuasion) in HR and a lot of HR (Human Relations) in Marketing. The main difference is that Marketing is all about taking; HR is about giving. The common thread? Psychology.

Here’s just a sampling of copywriting techniques I’ve used to make HR writing effective:

Predisposition—I predispose my audience (employees) by circulating a series of relevant newspaper clippings that support my concept or proposal before I put it up officially.

Engaging subject lines—see the heading of this article.

One2One copy—doesn’t this article read like a letter from me to you?

The Hook—if you’ve read this far, you’ve been taken in hook, line and sinker. 😉 

Look & Feel—fonts, layout, bullets, lots of white space, ellipses…

WIIFM—never forget that the reader is subconsciously asking, “What’s in it for me?’’ Well, if that’s you, put these techniques to work for you—like I said, they’re effective and free.

Very soon, top management noticed my newly-acquired persuasive writing style to the extent that they started sponsoring me to more AWAI courses such as B2B Copywriting, SEO Content Writing, UX Copywriting, Web Copywriting, White Paper writing, and Case Study writing.

Observing my keen interest in copywriting, and impressed by the voluminous AWAI course binders on my bookshelf at home, my father gifted me AWAI’s Masters course.

How I honed my copywriting skills while working in HR 
 

The loudmouths in marketing did their ‘writing’ with the spoken word—speaking is their forte.

I did my ‘talking’ with the written word—writing is the HR scribe’s forte.

So when it came time for writing marketing collaterals, the loudmouths were at a loss for words.

Their loss, my gain. 😉

Writing copy for my company gave me even more visibility than being head of HR. In less than a year, I became the company’s in-house copywriter, heading Corporate Communications in addition to HR.

writing-related initiatives that made me a Celebrity Employee